Memory is the Weapon

DON MATTERA

The Department of Arts and Culture (South Africa)

has contributed financially to the reprinting of Memory is the Weapon.

African Perspectives Publishing

PO Box 95342

Grant Park 2051

South Africa

www.africanperspectives.co.za

in association with

African Morning Star Publications

PO Box 562

Florida 1710

South Africa

© Don Mattera 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise,

without the prior written permission of the author.

First published by Raven Press 1987

This edition (revised) published by African Perspectives Publishing

in association with African Morning Star Publications 2007

ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-620-39487-1

ISBN (hard cover) 978-0-620-39490-1

Edited by Paul Denham

Typeset by Gail Day

Cover design by Phehello Mofoleng, Design Garage

Colour illustration courtesy of Peter Hammer Vertag, Wuppertal, Germany

Printed and bound by Intrepid Printers (Pty) Ltd

Contents

About Don Mattera

Introduction

chapter one

Demolition

chapter two

Bad News

chapter three

To Become a Man

chapter four

Sophiatown

chapter five

Dai-Sok

chapter six

A Brush with the Police

chapter seven

Dumazile

chapter eight

Other Faces of Kofifi

chapter nine

Father Trevor Huddleston

chapter ten

Pinocchio

chapter eleven

Gangland

chapter twelve

Jail

chapter thirteen

The Change

chapter fourteen

The Big Move

About Don Mattera

Donato Francesco Mattera has been celebrated as a journalist, editor, writer and poet. He is also acknowledged as one of the foremost activists in the struggle for a democratic South Africa, and helped to found both the Union of Black Journalists, the African Writer’s Association and the Congress of South African Writers.

Born in 1935 in Western Native Township (now Westbury) across the road from Sophiatown, Mattera can lay claim to an intriguingly diverse lineage: his paternal grandfather was Italian, and he has Tswana, Khoi-Khoi and Xhosa blood in his veins. Yet diversity was hardly being celebrated at that time. In one of apartheid’s most infamous actions, the vibrant multicultural Sophiatown was destroyed in 1955 and replaced with the white suburb of Triomf, and the wrenching displacement, can be felt in Mattera’s writing.

Writing was certainly not an obvious conclusion to his youth, which had been characterised by gangs, violence and jail. Partly under the influence of Father Trevor Huddleston, Mattera began wielding a pen rather than a knife, yet with equal facility; using the struggle as his subject, he went on to produce a series of poems, stories and plays of force and originality. The authorities responded by raiding his house, imprisoning, torturing, and banning him for ten years. It was during these tumultuous times that Mattera wrote the poems contained in Azanian Love Song. These were followed by plays, an autobiography, children’s writings and more poetry. All this was accomplished while he worked as a journalist for The Star, the Weekly Mail (now the Mail & Guardian) and other newspapers.

Mattera is the holder of several prestigious literary awards as well as numerous humanitarian citations, including the South African Presidential Order of Ikhamba – Silver (2007), the South African Department of Arts & Culture Literary Lifetime Achievement Award (2007), the Crown of Peace Award (Korea and Washington – 2004), the Ambassador of Peace Award (Kenya – 2001), the World Health Organisation’s Peace Award from the Centre of Violence and Injury Prevention (1997), and the French Human Rights Award for the We Care Trust. He has also been awarded an honorary PhD Literature, from the University of Natal.

He continues to serve as an active patron of several well-known charities in Johannesburg.

Introduction

By Bernard Magubane

Whatever the case, action is a reality! It forms part of that given existence from which the magical mind which claims to grasp and arrest the world may well emerge in order to hurl itself into the void but which it can transcend only illusorily. Action is a reality.

Henry Lafebvre, Dialectical Materialism

Don Mattera’s autobiographical essay is an example of the kind of action that Lafebvre describes in the passage above. Mattera’s poetry and books about the black condition and struggles in South Africa derive not from contemplation but from the thick of struggle. It is the combination of theory and practice that has earned Mattera the title of the ‘Bard of the people’s liberation struggle’. The story of his life in Sophiatown as told in this essay is intricate. Covering Mattera’s teenage years from 1948 to 1962 when Sophiatown was bulldozed out of existence, it weaves together both his personal experience and political development.

Through Mattera’s personal recollections we come as close as possible to a glimpse of how history actually happens, how one individual achieves self-awareness and moves from self-estrangement to become a conscious actor in history. In telling the story of his life as a coloured teenager, Mattera takes on the ambitious goal of making us recapture the crucial events of the 1950s in Sophiatown, one of the most important decades in the history of black political struggles in South Africa.

The Nationalist Party, which came to power in 1948 and has ruled South Africa ever since, chose as its main election issue the extension of the policy of apartheid, or baaskap (literally boss rule), to all areas of life. The election of this party, which espoused naked white supremacy, posed a serious challenge to black people throughout the country. The African National Congress (ANC), which had been founded in 1912, and the South African Indian Congress, formed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1908, worked out an alliance to resist the policies of the Nationalist Party and called on other ethnic parties to join them. The result was the Congress Alliance (CA) made up of the ANC, SAIC, the Coloured People’s Organisation, and the White Congress of Democrats. In 1952 the CA launched the Defiance Campaign – a non-violent challenge to the apartheid laws.

The aim of apartheid’s legal superstructure was to freeze black political expression by imposing a legal framework of unbelievable harshness and cruelty.

It was this atmosphere of ANC-led resistance that played a key role in Mattera’s political development and that made him put down the knife and gun (as gang leader) and take up the pen. One of the organisations that Mattera participated in was the Western Areas Student Association, a branch of the ANC’s youth wing. He also worked as a journalist and was the founder of the Union of Black Journalists. In 1986 he helped to found the Congress of South African Writers and after the banning of the Black Consciousness Movement became an executive member of the National Forum. These activities resulted in his being placed under house arrest and in his political banning.

Mattera might have remained a leader of the notorious Vultures gang, which he formed and which terrorised the people of Sophiatown in the early 1950s, had the Nationalist Party not embarked on its policy of cleaning the so-called black spots in white areas through the Group Areas Act of 1950. The resistance to this Act, which sought to racially segregate residential areas, aroused the political consciousness of large numbers of people, including Mattera. He recalls attending mass meetings held in the Newclare Victory Square and Sophiatown’s Freedom Square, where he heard the ANC leaders Dr Alfred Xuma, Dr YM Dadoo, Moses Kotane, OR Thambo, Nana Sita, Robert Resha, and others denounce the evils of apartheid. ANC activists like Robert Resha motivated gangs to redirect their frustrations to political activity, and in particular urged them to join the Defiance Campaign. Two individuals in particular made a great impact on Mattera’s life: Father Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican priest whose parish was in Sophiatown, and Nana Sita, the leader of the South African Indian Congress and Gandhi’s follower. Speaking of the latter, Mattera writes: Few men in this world continue to live beyond their graves; Nana Sita was one of them. He had transformed despair into hope; fear into understanding; cowardice into courage (p.11).

Sophiatown proved that black and white can live side by side. In this ghetto black intellectuals and whites discussed Shakespeare while enjoying American jazz in the subeens (speakeasies). Drum magazine helped many aspiring black writers of fiction to get started. It was in Sophiatown that African traditional music and Afro-American jazz produced a new synthesis called Tsaba-Tsaba, a musical form that propelled Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela and others to international fame. And yet the die-hard racists, decided that Sophiatown had to be razed to the ground – it produced too many troublesome natives.

Sophiatown

The Mattera family settled in Sophiatown, a slum near Johannesburg, where Don Mattera was born seventy-two years ago. Johannesburg itself is a product of the larger forces of world imperialism and finance, and especially it is a product of the discovery of gold in 1885-86. Johannesburg’s phenomenal growth is described as follows by Charles van Onslen:

The mining capitalist revolution that occurred on the Witwatersrand between 1886 and 1914 created and transformed Johannesburg. From a diggers’ camp of about 3,000 adventurers in 1887, there developed first a mining town with a population of over 100,000 people in 1896, and then, by 1914, an industrialising city with over a quarter of a million inhabitants. From the tented mining camp at the diggings in the 1880s, there grew the single-quarters and boarding-houses of corrugated-iron that clustered around the deep-level mines and city centre in the 1890s, and then the more substantial brick-built homes of the working class and other suburbs by. 1914. This dramatic surge and spread of population also reflected itself in other ways, for example in the changing municipal boundaries of Johannesburg. In 1898 the Town Council held jurisdiction over an area of five square miles; when the nominated Town Council under the occupying British forces first took control in 1901 this was extended to nine square miles; and by the time that civilian local government was firmly re-established in 1903 this had yet again increased to an enormous 82 square miles.¹

Sophiatown was spawned by the same forces that brought Johannesburg into being. Originally, Sophiatown was part of a farm called Waterval, which was bought by a white businessman named Tobiansky, who, after leasing it to the government for a few years, decided to build a township in memory of his wife and family after World War II Some of the streets that form part of Mattera’s story were named after Tobiansky’s children – Edith, Gerty, Bertha, Toby, Sol. The farm was divided into small building plots or stands – 50 by 100 feet, or 50 by 50 feet, bought initially by whites from Tobiansky. But by 1910 the town clerk was reporting that the township owners were selling the plots to anyone who had money. In 1912 a Johannesburg Town Council report observed that there are in Johannesburg suburbs, some of the stands of which were originally sold to white men, and where natives can now obtain ownership of stands on very reasonable terms. In Sophiatown, for example, we have a mixed population of black and white.²

This, then, is the origin of the racial mixture of the population of Sophiatown. When the city built a sewage-disposal system next to Sophiatown at the end of World War I, many whites left the town and moved to other suburbs such as Vrededorp, Brixton, and Mayfair. By the 1940s Sophiatown had become a demographic quilt – an amalgam of ethnic, social, and cultural groups; a cosmopolitan centre of intellectuals, radical politics, jazz, and gangsters.

Mattera describes with sympathy, and even with passion, the life and plight of Sophiatown in the 1950s, when the apartheid regime of the Nationalist Party that had gained power in 1948 decided that the mixing of the races and private ownership of the land by blacks contradicted its fundamental tenets and passed the Group Areas Act, which would set aside racially segregated residential areas for each ethnic group.

Many social scientists, including social historians, have observed how racial oppression, domination and the policy of apartheid, have fragmented the black population into ethnic and linguistic categories in order to weaken its bonds of community. But these studies have lacked the factuality, the first-hand experience, and the insights that Mattera brings to his subject. Few white social scientists can put themselves in Mattera’s shoes or understand fully the tragedy of being of mixed parentage under apartheid.

Although life was harsh for Mattera and the people of Sophiatown, it was also full of the creative spirit and constant excitement. Mattera describes with verve Sophiatown’s cultural and religious ambiance. The proliferation of fundamentalist sects, for example, indicated not only the harshness of life but the extent of alienation felt by the inhabitants. As Mattera puts it,

The Face of Religion beamed like colourful fluorescent advertisements from the countless Christian sects and Hindu, Moslem and Buddhist segments that preached and sold their understanding of penitence, redemption and reconciliation with God. There were the rituals of the African amaZioni with their frenzied worshipping through cymbals and drums that rose and fell from midnight hour until dawn. Men, women, old and young and children called frantically upon their God as if He was on a long, long holiday. Churches competed for the redemption of souls; trying as it were to sell God at a bargain price to people who had stopped buying, not because they had no money, but because they had no faith...

And salvation was going for a song but men, it appeared were not buying. Only older people opened their ears to listen to the song as they gave the remnants of their wasted and broken lives in the final compensatory service to the Great One…who ruled the earth and skies (pp.77).

Sophiatown was a world of brutality, of want, crime, love, beauty, and community. It was a metropolitan melting pot. Mattera has set his experiences and tribulations in the context of the times – the time of great political agitation among the oppressed led by the African National Congress and its allies, the South African Indian Congress, the Communist Party of South Africa (before it was banned in 1950), and the Coloured People’s Organisation.

The politics of being Coloured

The reality of being a Coloured in South Africa underlies the story of Don Mattera’s life and the destruction of Sophiatown. Mattera’s genealogy runs the gamut of ethnic experience: his paternal grandfather, Franscesco Mattera, was an Italian sailor who married a Griqua-Xhosa woman; Mattera’s mother belongs to the Tswana ethnic group. The Griquas themselves are the product of the frontier miscegenation between Boer settlers (descendants of the Dutch) and the Khoikhoi (the so-called Hottentots, who are the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape). Mattera is thus well qualified to interpret the implications of colour consciousness and racial discrimination in South Africa. He depicts with great clarity and justified anger the indignities that the racial purists of apartheid have inflicted on the African people, who are the majority, but also on the offspring of Europeans – especially the Afrikaners – and Africans.

Coloured is a grab-bag category, meaning simply that one is a particular hue, the result of belonging to one of the ethnic groups (or a mixture thereof) that make up the population of South Africa: Africans, Malay slaves, Indians (brought to South Africa as indentured labourers), and whites. South Africa’s laws distinguish several groups of Coloureds: the Cape Coloureds, who are the descendants of the so-called Bushmen and Hottentots (more accurately known as the Khoisan); the Cape Malay, the original Malay slaves, most of whom did not bring women with them, and who were brought to South Africa by the Dutch East India Company settlers; the less well-known coloured tribe of the Maasbieker, a type of Mozambique coloured; and the basters or Bastards – half-breeds mainly found in Namibia (South West Africa) and in parts of the Northern Cape. A fifth group comprises the Mauritian Coloureds, most of them light-skinned and long haired, and who are chiefly based in Natal. Unlike the Transvaal and the Cape Coloureds, who speak Afrikaans, the Natal Coloureds speak English. The most obnoxious and hated label is Other Coloureds, which refers to the offspring of relationships outside the white group, such as the children of African and Chinese, African and Indian, and Africans and all the coloured groups listed above. Mattera notes ironically, that what the segregationist could not escape was that many of these Bushman and Hottentot offspring had blue, grey or green eyes with straight blond hair (p.22). However, to be coloured or a person of mixed-blood in terms of the apartheid laws is a double negative: one is both a non-white and a non-black African.

The attempt to constitute the Coloured as an ethnic community separate from black and white has a long history in South Africa in politics. In the space available here, I can do no more than give a few examples of the political meaning of being Coloured. The constitution of Coloured as an ethnic group, by definition, implies an intentional effort to break the bonds of community between black Africans and their coloured offspring. This policy was instituted by British colonial officials just prior to the formation of the Union of South Africa as a white dominion within the British Empire in 1909. The Immorality Act (which goes back to 1927) and its various amendments – the Population Registration Act (and its various amendments) and the Group Areas Act (as amended) – exemplify the legal aspects of this effort and have made the life of Coloureds difficult indeed.

Lord Selborne, high commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Transvaal and Orange River colonies from 1905 to 1910, spelled out his policy of making the Coloureds a buffer between black and white in a memo to General Smuts:

Our object should be to teach the Coloured people to give their loyal support to the white population. It seems to me sheer folly to classify them with Natives, and by treating them as Natives to force them away from their natural allegiance to the whites and into making common cause with the Natives. If they are so forced, in the time of trouble they will furnish exactly those leaders which the Natives could not furnish for themselves. It is, therefore, in my opinion, unwise to think of treating them as Natives; and it would be as unjust as unwise. There are many Coloured people who are quite white inside, though they may be coloured outside. There are some, indeed, who are quite white outside